Tuesday, June 25, 2013

McBaby used to never say anything. He would just burble and giggle and occasionally whine. Then I had this great idea to teach him a bunch of words. The problem with this is that it turns out he has opinions about everything, and shares them all the time.

Goodbye kisses in the car? Those are not going without comment anymore.

Which socks to wear used to be a non-issue, but now he has an expressible preference that will not be ignored.

Monday, June 10, 2013

My brother-in-law, Trent, just returned home from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints! He has been gone two years and a lot of stuff has changed since he left. I was thinking about doing a, "2011-2012 Recap" to catch him up on the things he missed. I looked up a few lists on the internet and it turns out I didn't know about hardly any of the things that happened on any of the pop-culture-type lists.

So I have determined I am not the most qualified to do a review of 2011-2012 in general. Instead I decided to review some of the movies that I suspect people will be telling Trent he HAS to go see. That way he can avoid this:

Here are 5 movies people might freak out about:

A lot of people thought this movie was "Amazing" but to me it was one of those movies where if you have anything critical to say about it they say, "GEEZE! It's a COMIC-BOOK movie!" So I thought it was cheesy, and kind of ridiculous, but it's a comic book movie so I guess that stuff is all ok? At least there were a lot of buildings getting destroyed and bad guys doing bad things, so that was cool.

This was also a comic book movie, but no one says that about Batman, because it was actually a good movie! At first I was annoyed because Batman seemed all lame, literally, but then he became awesome again. I would watch this one again.

I love The Hobbit, the book, so I am pretty much bound by law to love this movie. I thought it was great. I was worried about all the singing, since musicals make me uncomfortable, but the singing in the movie is more like a Gregorian chant. Who doesn't love a good Gregorian chant? Note, if you don't love the Hobbit this movie might seem really really long to you.

It seems like this movie was enjoyable to watch, but I can remember basically nothing about it. I do remember that I thought the Hulk was going to be super boring, but then I thought he was actually pretty funny. I also thought Black Widow and her dinky little 9mm gun were going to be a joke, but I thought she was a pretty respectable character. (In fairness, I don't think that gun really did much.)

This movie killed me to death. It was so ridiculous that I have been trying to banish it from my mind. Tom Cruise had some sticky gloves that let him climb a building, until they didn't work, BUT HE STILL DIDN'T DIE! Why? Why get my hopes up like that? There is a really long list of things that happened that were dubious at best, and laughable at worst. I wouldn't watch it if I were you Trent!

There were lots of other movies that came out, but I didn't see most of them. The last Harry Potter came out and I liked that one, but I think Trent didn't bother to watch the ones that came out before his mission so I didn't draw a picture of that one.

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

I have finished the second storage ottoman! For this one I got some cute fabric online. When the fabric came though, it was a lot brighter than I expected.

The colors were cute, but next to my more subdued blue ottoman they looked cRaZY. I wanted a red that was closer to my red door, (you can see it in the background here) and a blue that was more blue-green.

I decided I still wanted to use the fabric, I just needed a way to take the colors down from 11. I had heard people use tea as dye, to give things a muted antiquey look, and I thought that would tame my colors just perfectly. So I found this online tutorial for antiquing and decided to go for it.

The trouble is, I'm LDS, and Mormons don't drink tea. (No, we don't drink any kind of tea only tisanes.) Also, other than the difference between herbal tea and a tisane, I know basically nothing about tea. The tutorial said to use black tea, but all the teas have weird, non-descriptive names. There was only one box that clearly said "Black Tea" and it was a giant box with 100 bags. I didn't want to buy that much if I could avoid it, so I stood there reading the back of every box trying to find out what kind of tea was in them.

Of course in the middle of this tea-reading-fest I saw some people who go to church with me. Also of course they were not people that I know well enough to say, "I'm not going to drink this! I'm going to wash some weirdly bright fabric with it!" but they were people to whose kids I have been teaching the Word of Wisdom this month. So I just awkwardly asked the lady next to me if she knew which kind of tea contains black tea, "BECAUSE I NEED SOME TO DYE SOME FABRIC." She also didn't know anything about tea, but pointed out the giant 100 bag box that said "Black Tea" on the front, which I still didn't want to buy.

SO, if you find yourself in this situation, it turns out that "Earl Grey" tea is black tea, even though it is not called "Earl Black," and they sell it in pretty small boxes. (It is also Captain Picard's favorite.) And it worked really well:

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McEwens

I am Rachel McEwen, even though I have pictures of Bryce McEwen on here he actually has very little to do with this blog. That is why it is full of girly stuff. We live in California and are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We like to play outside and do projects of all shapes and sizes. I am making this blog to chronicle our projects big and small.